All Reading and Responses

Week 1:

The article I decided to write about was “Captain America in a turban”. The quote that stuck out to me was ““Captain America does not have a turban and beard,” he said. He had a child’s curious tone. No malevolence. “Why not?” I asked him. “I was born here. We could have a new Captain America who is Sikh or black or Hispanic.”” This quote is in the beginning of the article. The article is written by and about editorial cartoonist Vishavjit Singh. Singh has been documenting the lives of Sikhs in the aftermath of 9/11. After drawing a cartoon of a turbaned and bearded Captain America, photographer Fiona Aboud got the idea for Singh to go around NYC for one day dressed as Captain America. Despite some skepticism from Singh on how it would go, he agreed. And to his surprise almost all of the responses were positive. People, young and old, were stopping him in the street and taking pictures and talking to him. Although there are some people that were negative towards Singh, he shook it off due to the all the good responses from the mass of the public. I think that this shows that many people in the US are starting to become more accepting of different races, especially Sikhs. It took a lot of courage to go out and do this and I think that if there were more people, who did things like this, America would become more accepting of things that are foreign to us.

Week 2:

In the first video and the article, a woman is breaking away from the the part of the culture she was raised in. In the poetry slam, the poet talks about how in her family the women have always been very skinny and quiet while the men are primarily large and loud. Women were taught to shrink their presence while men made theirs larger. In the article, it is discussed that women are supposed to always be smiling and look pleasant and happy no matter what they are feeling. Both of these women want to break away from the norm that they experience in their lives. The poet wants to change because she did not want to end up like her mom or any of the other women in her family: very skinny and frail.

The second video was very thought provoking. I believe it was a speaker giving a talk to college students during their graduation ceremony. The speaker talked about how life after college is all routine and little things like lines at the grocery store and traffic will enrage you more than you will admit. He goes on to say that instead of getting mad, you should take a minute to think about what is going on in the lives of other and not act like the world just revolves around you. I really liked this video because it makes me think about what is going on with other people and be more understanding instead of just caring about myself.

Week 3:

I think that the tip that was most helpful when doing my interview was #7, which was "Don't worry if your questions are not as beautifully phrased as you would like them to be for posterity. A few fumbled questions will help put your narrator at ease as she realizes that you are not perfect and she need not worry if she isn't either. It is not necessary to practice fumbling a few questions; most of us are nervous enough to do that naturally." When we were in class on Tuesday and developing our questions, many of mine were short or not as descriptive as I wanted them to be. It puts me at more ease by not worrying at how my questions were phrased and I could pay more attention to the interview.

The tip that I found the most surprising was #7 which was "Interviewing is one time when a negative approach is more effective than a positive one." I would not have thought to bring up a more negative description in an interview but after reading the tip I see that putting something in a negative light will get a better answer out of the interviewee.

I kept the page with the tips up while I conducted my interview and tried to follow them as closely as possible. I did not interrupt the interview at any point and I tried to ask my questions in a manner that would get a better response.

Week 4:

In my opinion, citing is the worst part of writing, but also one of the most necessary aspects of it. I, like many others here, do not know how to cite well and would be completely lost without the help of online automatic citation machines. I believe that this is because long ago in the beginning of high school, teachers were not always as helpful as they could be with citing. I remember sitting in English class freshman year and our teacher explaining to us our first major paper. She said that we should all know how to cite by now so she was not going to spend time on it. This was basically how every teacher was like so fast forward to present day, I still do not have the slightest idea on how to cite anything without the help of the Internet. The main question that I have about citing is how to do the in-text citations correctly based on if the source you are citing is a website, book, etc.

Week 6:

I noticed a few of the grammar errors throughout my first two paragraphs of the draft. These included wrong word use, most with effect and affect, and wrong tense of verbs, which makes them, not agree with the subject. Other errors had to do with run-on sentences and misuse of commas or fused sentences. These can all be fixed by reading through my work a little more carefully or having someone else go through everything to make sure sentences and word agreement are correct.

The discussion in the video talks about empathy. The speaker begins and talks about the history of empathy and the process of researching it goes and what people find from this research. It is hard to truly feel empathy and every study in the world could not give you a solid answer. You cannot go into a situation and think that you have a full understanding of what is going on or what a person is going through.

Week 7:

I really liked the essay; it brought up an interesting and thought provoking topic. It was interesting how race was described as a social fiction. In the case of the twins, the author talks about how the black baby lost a form of cultural identity from being taken away from his birth mother. There is a possibility that he will grow up in a "cultural no man's land" due to the switch. There were many different facts and personal stories over the course of the essay, which helped, describe the idea and meaning clearly. I though that all of the information dealing with the studies conducted with the dolls showed how racist society can be, even at a young age. The essay flowed together really well starting with the custody of the two children to stories of the author's life and her cousin. I really liked how it made you think about the way society perceives race.

Week 8:

Also did not have a partner but I did not look at this till now but yeah. I really liked the idea of your essay. It is an interesting topic to read about; I have friends at Drexel who are international students but none of whom are from anywhere in Europe. There were a few things that I would say you should fix with the essay. It is not anything big really, just some spelling or grammatical errors. I noticed that there were a lot of missing commas but that is not the biggest issue; it is a pretty easy fix by just re-reading the essay one or two times over. Also some sentences could be re-organized to flow a little better in my opinion. It would have been nice to see more of the article present within the paper. You only really talked about it for a short paragraph and personally I would like to see what else your friend had to say on the topic. Overall, I really liked the paper and the only things you need to fix are just little. It was interesting to see how an international student feels about being at Drexel.

Week 9:

Prior begins her article talking about two separate other articles: Gregory Currie's "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?" and Annie Murphy Paul's "Reading literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer." Both of these articles asked similar questions to what Prior was addressing and uses both as references when developing her article. This causes the beginning half of her article to be primarily based off other people's ideas and quotes in the beginning half of the article. Prior says at one point that "Reading is one of the few distinctively human activities that set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom." This quote stuck with me most throughout the essay. She talks about how reading is either carnal or spiritual which makes sense because reading that you are forced to do is less enjoyable then reading that is done for recreation. It would have been nice for her to develop the part where she talked about literature more. What sort of literature are people attracted to and is there any reason why?